Scythebill 18.2.0 - Browse by trips improvements, privacy preferences, and more

Scythebill 18.2.0 is now available.  It includes a number of new features, most notably improvements to "Browse by trips" and new privacy options in Preferences.

As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Facebook or by email.

Browse by trips improvements

The recently added "Browse by trips" page now has several new options at the top of the screen:

Lots of new features!

For starters, every time you select a trip (or multiple trips), you'll immediately see how many lifers you got on that trip. You can also enable "Highlight lifers?" to clearly show you those lifers.

It's also much easier to find trips - you can enter the name of a trip (in typical choose-your-own-abbreviation Scythebill fashion) in a new field at the upper left, then click "Jump to" to immediately select it.

And once you've picked a trip, you can find a species fast with a separate species name and "Jump to" button - here at the upper right.

Privacy preferences

The preferences page now has three new options:

By default, Scythebill will use Google Maps and eBird hotspot APIs to help compute latitudes and longitudes, or to find locations near latitude/longitude pairs. These requests do not and have never sent any cookies to those APIs, but if you're uncomfortable with those requests being sent to Google and eBird, you can now disable them.

Scythebill also defaults to using Google Maps to display maps around locations, and when you click a site icon next to a location name with latitude/longitude, it'll open a web browser with Google Maps.  If you're uncomfortable with that choice, you can now switch to OpenStreetMap, or disable maps altogether.

Scythebill also now includes a concise privacy policy in its Help menu, outlining what Scythebill does, or rather doesn't do with your data. I don't expect any surprises lurking in the text, but please let me know if you have any concerns whatsoever.

Other improvements

When you enter a location name, Scythebill will now prefer recently and commonly used location names, so Scythebill will give you local patches before some site you visited once in 1995!

You can also now enter "magic" location names, like the ABA region and Western Palearctic, in the "Jump to" option in Browse by location. Entering these will automatically select all the constitutent locations.  So, for example, "ABA region" will select Canada, the (continental) US, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, and Hawaii, and give you the combined checklist.

Finally, the disk image files on MacOS now have a more useful appearance, making it clearer and easier to copy Scythebill into your Applications folder:

Bug fixes

• The "Enter sightings" table had a variety of visual oddities that cropped up with the interface refresh in 18.1.0.  It should now look more consistent and readable in both light and dark modes.
• When entering sightings, the Cancel button would not give you any warnings of lost work if you cancelled before you had entered any species. That could be quite annoying if you'd entered a long visit or trip description!  It now warns you much sooner.
• An odd and long-standing bug where a day-less date like "March 2003" was not considered after "February 14 2002" has been fixed.
• The "Jump to" species button in "Show reports" didn't work to jump to subspecies or groups, and now does.
• The AOS North region checklist omitted Cuba and The Bahamas;  this didn't affect your species list for this region, but it meant that (for example) reports would claim there are only 4 species of Tody, not 5.

AviList and Scythebill

This time, the blog takes a break from the usual release announcements to talk about the brand new AviList taxonomy, and how (and when) Scythebill will support it.

What's AviList?

AviList is a unified, global checklist of birds. After nearly seven years of work, it's just been made public. They plan to perform annual updates going forward.

A new checklist itself wouldn't be big news, but eBird, IOC, and BirdLife International; all participated in its development (as did many other notables), and have committed to converging on this single checklist.

When do the other checklists converge?

IOC will go first.  Its last release (15.2) is expected later this year, at which point their prodigious work comes to an end.

eBird comes next, replacing their taxonomy with the AviList taxonomy in October 2026 (though they only promise "near 100% alignment with AviList by its 2026 update" - emphasis added). I assume, but have not seen explicitly stated, that they will actually produce a custom taxonomy on top of AviList, adding groups and undescribed taxa on top of the core.

BirdLife - whose IUCN RedList assessments are included in Scythebill, but not its taxonomy - will take longer, as they need to perform new assessments on many taxa.

So... what about Scythebill?

It's clear that come the eBird update in 2026, Scythebill will be standardized on the AviList taxonomy (or, perhaps, the eBird extension, with groups and undescribed taxa), and will no longer need to support multiple bird taxonomies. (Though eBird's "near 100%" comment gives me pause.) This is great!

But what about now?  There are two issues with adding AviList v2025 as an additional taxonomic option right now:

• First, there are some shortcuts in the Scythebill code which assume two taxonomies (one primary - eBird, and one secondary - IOC).  Adding a third taxonomy means hunting down all potential bugs in this code, just to delete all that code in a year when we're down to one taxonomy.
• Second, AviList doesn't yet have an up-to-date subspecies list: "AviList v2025 started with a baseline list of subspecies from IOC v11.2 (July 2021), and this initial subspecies taxonomy has been largely carried through to AviList v2025". Because Scythebill uses subspecies (and indeed, relies on them for mapping between taxonomies), this is troublesome.
  

The first makes me hesitant to add AviList as a third option, though I'm not yet entirely ruling it out. The second makes it undesirable to replace IOC with AviList.  Because of this, my current plan is not to support AviList v2025.  And since the October 2026 update of eBird will (hopefully) make it silly to have both AviList and eBird, the simplest option is converging at that date.  As always, Scythebill will automatically update your records to that taxonomy when you upgrade.

I recognize this is a long delay, and birders are understandably eager to adopt this unified list.  That said, I believe the IOC 15.2 release will be very close to AviList v2025 at the species level (indeed, even eBird is already 99% aligned!), and I'm hoping that will be good enough for the majority of Scythebill users. If it's very different, I'll reconsider.

I do plan, though, to add the following features in the coming months:

• The Splits and Lumps report will let users see what AviList will change for their list, relative to both eBird and IOC
• All English name changes in AviList will be added as alternate names (ensuring that imports from AviList will be smooth).

Scythebill 18.1.0 - dark mode support, editable image names, trip links, and more

Scythebill 18.1.0 is now available.  It includes dark mode support - along with a general UI refresh, editable image names, trip links, and a number of smaller bug fixes.

As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Facebook or by email.

Update: Scythebill 18.1.1 includes small fixes which should greatly improve the experience for Linux HiDPI users and also moderately increase text contrast in dark mode.

Dark mode support

Scythebill now supports "dark mode" - a mode where screens use light text on a dark background, instead of dark text on a light background. For many of us, this might be an irrelevancy - but for others, this has become a must-have feature for their applications.

Dark mode on MacOS!

You can switch the mode from light to dark on the Preferences screen.

On Windows and MacOS, Scythebill defaults to an "Auto" mode, which follows the operating system's choice.  Scythebill on Linux doesn't offer that feature, but you can still explicitly choose light or dark.

As part of this update, many aspects of the UI have been refreshed and cleaned up.

Editable photo names

If you add a lot of photos to Scythebill, especially off webpages, you're likely tired of seeing names like "AF1Qip....";  Scythebill just showed the last part of the URL.  Now, there's a small pencil icon on names, and you can easily edit names, so when you've added a photo:

... then click the pencil, type a name...

...and hit "Enter" (or just select anything else on screen), and done!

Trip links

Trips now let you attach links, so you can attach trip reports, group photos, or anything else you'd like to remember as part of the trip.  As with photos, there's a "pencil" you can click to easily edit the name:

Smaller fixes

• The two Sinai governorates of Egypt are now properly included in Asia.  (There are three governorates which are in both Asia and Africa, and these are all still in Africa.)
• The provinces of Nepal have been updated to follow the current eBird (and Nepalese!) arrangement of 7 provinces.
• A few issues with editing sightings in Browse by location have been resolved.

Scythebill 18.0 - Trips! and one-step, no-export Wildlife Recorder imports!

Scythebill 18.0.0 is now available, with a couple of big new features!

For all users, Scythebill now supports the notion of trips - recording sightings for a trip that lasted more than just a single day. You can also organize old visits into trips - and Scythebill can automate that for work for you too.

And for Wildlife Recorder users, you can now import into Scythebill right from Wildlife Recorder's own .mdb files.  No need to run painstaking separate exports for each country - you can import an entire taxonomy's records in one go, right from Scythebill, without even opening Wildlife Recorder!

The trip feature required a lot of changes in the guts of Scythebill, so I'm more worried about bugs than I am in a typical release. I'd call this a "beta" release of Scythebill. If you're not specifically interested in either of these features, you might hold off on this release for a bit.

As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Facebook or by email.

Update: Scythebill 18.0.1 and 18.0.2 each added a few quality improvements to 18.0.0.  See notes about those releases at the end.

Trips!

Scythebill has long let users enter sightings with vague dates - "December 2015", or just "2010".  But there wasn't a way to record sightings for a trip that was a bit precise, but not a single date - say, "November 11-15, 2017".  This was particularly awkward for users importing data from birding software that leaned heavily on this (like Wildlife Recorder).

Now, Scythebill can store sightings attached to a "Trip" - a location with a start date and an end date.  There's a new "Browse by trips" page in Scythebill that lets you see all of your sightings by trip:

The new Browse by trips page.

This page lets you view trips, delete them, merge them, and create trip reports using all the sightings and the new "Trip notes" feature.  And it's got a handy button - Automatically create trips... - which can quickly gather all of your existing sightings in Scythebill into a list of trips.

You can also see your trips in Browse by location, and enter new sightings as trips.

You can also mix and match using visits and trips if you want.  This way, you can enter yet another trip with Rock Pigeon and House Sparrow without carefully tracking the location, while keeping exact dates and places - as visits - for more special species.  If the visits you enter fall within the date range you've given, those sightings will automatically be included in the trip.

I'm hoping to add more features over time to Trips. If you've got ideas, let me know!

Wildlife Recorder one-step imports

After decades of support for the birding community, Wildlife Recorder is no longer being supported.  Scythebill has long offered support for importing from Wildlife Recorder, but it's been lacking in some ways (none of the trip data was supported by Scythebill), and it required repeated per-country exports from Wildlife Recorder, followed by repeated per-country imports into Scythebill.  This was all a bit fiddly.

Now, it's one step in Scythebill, and zero steps in Wildlife Recorder:  Scythebill can import directly off of the .mdb files that Wildlife Recorder used for its storage.  You don't need to be on Windows, or even have access to the Wildlife Recorder software. If you've got a backup of the Wildlife Recorder data, that'll work too - the .mdb files are right there in the backup's .zip file.

And Scythebill imports more data than it used to - trip data and observer names, for instance - and does a much better job of creating locations only when needed.  It'll even automatically use either the IOC or eBird/Clements taxonomy data from inside Wildlife Recorder depending on which taxonomy you have selected in Scythebill/

If you use non-bird taxonomies in Wildlife Recorder, each of those has its own .mdb file, so you will need to do one import per taxonomy.  But you can keep all of your data across all taxonomies in a single Scythebill file!

If you try this and find any data missing that you expected, please let me know.  I've had to reverse-engineer how Wildlife Recorder stored its data from a couple of examples, but in particular didn't have any examples of sighting "pinpoints" or media usage.

Other changes and fixes

• The front page of Scythebill has been updated a bit to include the new "Browse by trip" button, as well as putting "Manage taxonomies" up front.
• Canadian users had issues importing eBird checklist files. This is fixed.
• Scythebill should do a better job of getting imported sightings to the "right" location for how Scythebill organizes sightings (e.g., Papua being imported to Australasian Indonesia, the Galapagos Islands being imported there instead of as a state of mainland Ecuador, etc.).
• Scythebill's also better at supporting alternate country names (St Lucia instead of Saint Lucia, for example).
• Imports with subspecies data are handled better when there are differences between the current taxonomy in Scythebill and the taxonomy of the original software.
• 18.0.1: Wildlife Recorder .mdb file imports were broken on MacOS; they now work there as well.
• 18.0.1: You can edit sightings inside Browse by trips.
• 18.0.1: When editing trip info, there's a Trip sightings... button to take you straight into "Enter sightings" for the trip.
• 18.0.1: For Browse by trips, if a species has just one sighting, you no longer get a bunch of screen space taken up by a list with that one sighting - rather, you're taken straight into a sighting editing panel.  This should save a click in many circumstances.
• 18.0.1: The installer now works on Fedora Linux
• 18.0.2: Browse by trips now has a chooser to select between showing species only, eBird/Clements groups, or subspecies. 
• 18.0.2: A number of issues with cutting and pasting sightings in Browse by location have been fixed.
• 18.0.2: An error seen by multiple users when changing reporting options in Show reports has been fixed.
• 18.0.2: Trip reports have mildly tweaked formatting, leaning more on tabs and using a few less new lines.
• 18.0.2: Trip reports generated from Show reports now have trip informatio

Scythebill 17.2 - IOC 15.1 taxonomy

Scythebill 17.2.0 is now available.  This release includes the IOC 15.1 taxonomy, and several bug fixes - mostly for eBird imports. As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Facebook or by email.

IOC 15.1 taxonomy

The IOC 15.1 taxonomy was finalized a couple of days ago, and is now available in Scythebill!

Do you like splits, and your life list growing ever larger without leaving the comfort of your armchair?  Well then, this IOC taxonomy release is ... not the one for you.  The world taxonomies are converging on a taxonomy via the Working Group on Avian Checklists, and in this release IOC has un-split a number of splits that IOC offered, but eBird/Clements (and some other taxonomies) had not.

As a result, you're likely to see your IOC life list shrink a bit.  My own dropped by 11 - 13 lumps offset by just 2 splits.

My "Splits and Lumps" report

Bug fixes

There's a variety of bug fixes, mostly centered on eBird imports.

• The last version of Scythebill added support for importing "Download my data" exports straight from the .zip file.  That support didn't work on Macs;  it does now.
• eBird sightings of hybrids should now import successfully.
• eBird checklist .csv files should now import for non-English eBird users.  (I don't know if this is a recent change in eBird or a long-standing feature gap in Scythebill.)
• "New for year" import counts were incorrect when your import spanned multiple years.

Scythebill 17.1 - more spreadsheet options for reports and checklists

Scythebill 17.1.0 is now available.  This release includes some new features for report and checklist spreadsheets, and some . As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Facebook or by email.

More options for spreadsheets

When saving a report as a spreadsheet, you previously had only one "sort by" option.  It wasn't obvious, but this sorted the species, not the sightings.  If you wanted a list of species in taxonomic order, you couldn't have any sighting other than the earliest.  So if you wanted to generate a report with last-seen dates, there wasn't a great way to do it:

Old spreadsheet options

Now, you can sort both species and sightings, and the dialog has been reorganized:

New spreadsheet options

Checklist spreadsheets have added a similar option. There, the only support was showing your first sighting from the checklist area. So, if you were traveling to Peru for the first time, there wasn't a way to create a checklist that shows where you had seen those species outside of Peru. Now, you can:

New checklist spreadsheet options

There's four options for the sighting - the first sighting (if any) from Peru, the most recent (if any) from Peru, your first sighting anywhere, and the most recent sighting anywhere.

Other changes

• Wildlife Recorder imports now automatically preserve the "Very common", "Common", and "Scarce" approximate numeric counts (-3, -2, and -1 respectively) by copying that text into the sighting notes.
• Tabs in location names are no longer converted to spaces after saving and loading.
• Users who hit the previous bug and were very unlucky could get into a state where their .bsxm files were un-loadable. Scythebill now recovers from this state automatically.

Scythebill 17.0.2 and 17.0.3 - bug fixes

Scythebill 17.0.2 is now available.  This release includes no new features, only bug fixes and small improvements. As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Facebook or by email.

Update: Scythebill 17.0.3 included a number of additional bug fixes and small features.

Import/export fixes

• Observation.org/Waarneming imports will work once again - they changed their format to use localized strings for group names ("Vogels" instead of "Birds") and place names.
• An error message some users saw in imports while looking up locations is resolved.
• Very large eBird exports (large enough to require multiple files) would split almost all checklists across those files.  They'll now be much better at keeping checklists together in each file.
• 17.0.3: eBird files can now be imported directly from .zip files - especially useful for eBird's "MyData" mass exports, which come as .zip files.
• 17.0.3: Some CSV editing software would add "byte-order marks" to CSV files which usually don't have them, breaking imports. Scythebill now always supports these files (by ignoring the byte-order marks).
• 17.0.3: Scythebill now gives a much better error message if a provided Wildlife Recorder "locations export" file appears to be invalid.
• 17.0.3: "Observado" imports are now properly named "Observation.org".

Spreadsheet fixes

• When Scythebill picks an earliest or most recent sighting, it no longer ignore times; it is now used as a tie-breaker when dates are the same.
• Saving a multi-taxonomy checklist as a spreadsheet in Browse by location should be much faster.
• Report spreadsheets sometimes had overly wide common name, scientific name, and location columns. These should now be much more reasonably sized.
• 17.0.3: There is now a "#" column in sorted report spreadsheets, which skips uncountable taxa (like sp's, hybrids, and escapees).

Other changes

• Windows users who tried to open up Scythebill files from directly in .zip files would be unable to save;  now, they'll get a warning message as soon as the file is open, asking them to save a copy outside of the .zip.
• Scythebill will more consistently give you a good error message when you try to save into a folder that your operating system doesn't allow.
• 17.0.3: Scythebill had stopped showing "new for year" if these were the first species of any sort to be recorded that year, a common problem on Jan. 1!
• 17.0.3: Using the "even more specific?" feature for entering very specific locations would incorrectly reset the parent location to World.